Contents

Life

He was born in Mallus in Cilicia, and was brought up at
Tarsus, and then
moved to Pergamon, and
there lived under the patronage of Eumenes II, and Attalus II. He was the founder
of the Pergamon school of grammar, and seems to have been at one time the
head of the library of Pergamon. Among his followers were Hermias
(Κρατήτειος Ἑρμείας mentioned in sch. Hom. Il. 16.207a), Zenodotus
of Mallus and Herodicus of Babylon.

He visited Rome as ambassador
of either Eumenes, in 168 BC, or Attalus in 159 BC. Having broken
his leg and been compelled to stay there for some time, he
delivered lectures which gave the first impulse to the study of
grammar and criticism among the Romans.[1]

Works

Crates made a strong distinction was made between criticism
and grammar, the latter of
which he regarded as subordinate to the former. A critic, according
to Crates, should investigate everything which could throw light
upon literature; the
grammarian was only to apply the rules of language to clear up the
meaning of particular passages, and to settle the text, prosody, accentuation, etc. From this part
of his system, Crates derived the surname of Kritikos.

Like Aristarchus of Samothrace,
Crates gave the greatest attention to the works of Homer, from his labours upon which he was also
surnamed Homerikos. He wrote a commentary on the Iliad and Odyssey in nine books. Some fragments of this
commentary are preserved by the scholiasts and other
ancient writers. His principles were opposed to those of
Aristarchus, who was the leader of the Alexandrian school. Crates was the chief
representative of the allegorical theory of exegesis, and
maintained that Homer intended
to express scientific or philosophical truths in the form of
poetry.

The Globe of
Crates

According to Strabo, Crates
devised a globe representing the
Earth, which is thus the
earliest known globe representing the Earth:

We have now traced on a spherical surface the area in which we
say the inhabited world is situated; and the man who would most
closely approximate the truth by constructed figures must
necessarily take for the earth a globe like that of Crates, and lay
off on it the quadrilateral, and within the quadrilateral put down
the map of the inhabited world. But since the need of a large
globe, so that the section in question (being a small fraction of
the globe) may be large enough to receive distinctly the
appropriate parts of the inhabited world and to present the proper
appearance to observers, it is better for him to construct a globe
of adequate size, if he can do so; and let it be no less than ten
feet in diameter.[3]